(368) Abusing the ADA to Cheat in Law School
Plus, a stunning article from Australia on AI remote test proctoring. Plus, China shuts down generative AI for national exams. Plus, a request.
Issue 368
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Cheating in Law School, With the ADA
The Wall St. Journal has a commentary article (subscription required) about cheating in law school, contending that students are abusing laws and policies that give students with documented disabilities extra time to complete exams.
As background, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires schools to provide accommodations for students:
with conditions that impair “major life activities” such as learning, reading and concentrating.
As further background, the editorial pages at WSJ are quite conservative. So, the article is really not about the cheating, but about how a school threatened to punish a student for speaking out about the disability-linked cheating.
Whether that happened or not — and setting aside what you or I may think of it — abusing the ADA for academic advantage is pretty common. That’s because documentation of the required impairment is not difficult to obtain and schools, rather understandably, don’t push too hard against accommodations for students. I’ve had several integrity and testing leaders complain to me about this, privately, for years.
In fact, if you remember the dramatically over-hyped Varsity Blues scandals in which rich families paid a broker to scam their children into elite schools, abusing the ADA was the first step.
The broker would direct families to a known doctor who would write a letter professing that the student needed testing accommodations on standardized college aptitude tests such as the SAT or ACT. This allowed the student to take the tests alone, and in private, with a single proctor. The broker then routed the student to a bribed proctor at a controlled facility and a trained, adult test-taker took the test instead. In other words, the entire illicit enterprise would likely have been impossible but for abusing the ADA.
The WSJ article looks at exam accommodations in law schools in California and has some interesting information, such as:
a 2023 Oregon Law Review paper reports data on public law schools obtained through state public-records laws. As of 2021—before the post-Covid rise in disability accommodations—the accommodations rates were 21.3% at the University of California, Hastings (now UC Law San Francisco) and 25.5% at UC Irvine.
I have no idea what those rates should be, but I also find it difficult to process that 20-something percent of all future lawyers have impairments that limit their ability to read, learn, and concentrate. If that is true, we have a different problem.
For comparison, the article offers:
The Law School Admissions Council reports that only 12% of first-year law students nationwide said they had a mental or physical disability in 2023, suggesting that many students who don’t need accommodations are using them to get a leg up. The California Bar Exam’s accommodations rate, by contrast, is around 7%.
The California Bar Exam requires extra, more thorough evidence of disability than law schools do.
At Pepperdine, a private law school in California, the article says:
students say many of their classmates who ranked near the top of the class, made it onto the law review, and secured competitive jobs at major law firms received extended time on tests. The university denied that students with disabilities are disproportionately represented in these groups.
Earlier in the article, Pepperdine students estimated that as many as a third of law students were receiving assessment accommodations.
As we know from research on cheating, few things push students to academic misconduct more reliably than seeing other students cheat and get away with it (see Issue 149 for just one example). The article nods to this as well:
Students face a perverse incentive structure that rewards those crafty enough to cheat, hurts those with true disabilities, and punishes those brave enough to speak out.
I’m not sure about the last part, but fine. It is true that allowing cheating is corruptive and corrosive. Unfortunately, there is not much the schools can do, or will do, about this particular kind of fraud. Continuing:
Law schools, for their part, fear violating disability law or being perceived as discriminating against disabled students. The result is an erosion of standards.
This, I thought was interesting and significant:
“There is a statistically significant negative correlation between the percentage of students in a school who receive accommodations and the school’s first-time bar passage rate,” the Oregon Law Review study found.
I did not check the study myself, but maybe. Sure.
I like that the article does not just problem-point. The author writes:
One solution is for states to condition public funding on whether law schools align their standards with those of their respective bar exams. Another is for the federal government to require schools to disclose their rates of accommodations.
Aligning accommodation standards in law school to that of the state bar exam makes sense. Though some state bar exams will have lower standards, they probably already do. So, standardizing the standards is probably a better first step. Requiring schools to disclose makes sense too. I am in favor of data.
Either way, abusing the ADA for unfair academic advantage is a problem and should be addressed, at every level. But like most cheating, I seriously, seriously doubt anyone has the stomach for it. So instead, we’re going to continue to let it happen.
AI-powered Remote Test Proctoring Enables Remote Learning in Australia
The Geelong Advertiser has an article (subscription required) about AI-powered exam supervision of remote assessments in Australia.
It’s not much of an article, to be honest. But it’s a pretty stunning reversal from what we’ve seen in the past out of Australia, and therefore noteworthy.
For years, coverage — which I infer was generally reflective of attitudes on the topic — has been overly hostile to so-called AI proctoring or invigilation. Coverage often centered around unwelcomed surveillance, or creepy eye-tracking software, or big corporate abuse of student privacy. Or something equally absurd. Very seldom did the coverage mention actual cheating, or how assessment security standards allow students to take exams at home, or anywhere, and how this might actually be better for students.
This most recent offering is different in that it focuses on the latter — how remote assessment security helps students. Imagine that. In Australia of all places. It starts:
Sophie Adams is in her third year of a double nursing and psychology degree at Deakin and has never been to an exam hall.
There’s this as well:
“I sat exams in person at school, but at uni I’ve only ever done exams online,” Ms Adams said.
“I do find the whole progression of AI very strange but on a personal level I’d rather sit at home where I’m comfortable.”
Ms Adams said it had been incredibly helpful last year, when she had to return home to her remote Tasmanian hometown for surgery.
“I’ve completed exams from Tassie and other states around Australia,” she said.
Deakin Professor Phill Dawson, the co-director of Deakin’s Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning, said AI enabled those in regional areas or those raising children to sit exams.
“I’ve spoken with students who have told me they wouldn’t have been able to do exams otherwise,” he said.
Again, I am stunned to see a straight-ahead treatment of remote exam proctoring and why it can benefit students. To see this quote from Dawson, who has not always been a fan of remote exam supervision, is remarkable.
More from the article:
Mr Dawson said while they weren’t cheat-proof, there was good evidence that supervised online exams detected cheating.
“But we haven’t had any major breaching,” he said.
Yes, as Dawson has said before (see Issue 119), there’s good evidence that securing remote exams with a supervising proctor reduces cheating. And he’s right as well — almost no exam is cheat-proof, especially one that’s remote.
But being the skeptic I am, I point out that “haven’t had any major breaching” means “haven’t had any major breaching that we know about.”
Whatever, he’s still right on the overall point — remote assessment security reduces cheating and enables remote study.
And though it’s not mentioned in the article, two other overlooked benefits of remote test proctoring are having a video record which can be reviewed to substantiate or refute misconduct, and the inability to proctor-shop. Knowing your proctor ahead of time, having access to them, is a real security vulnerability — see above about Varsity Blues. No one is going to even try to bribe or threaten a remote proctor, especially when the entire interaction is recorded.
Anyway, I don’t know what to do with an article — especially one in Australia — that covers the benefits of remote test proctoring. I’m a little stunned.
China Turns Off Generative AI for National College Placement Exams
According to coverage in The Guardian and elsewhere, to prevent cheating during its high-stakes national college acceptance exams, China unplugged its generative AI tools — almost as if there’s a link between generative AI tools and cheating.
Cough.
The Guardian headline is:
Chinese tech firms freeze AI tools in crackdown on exam cheats
The first few paragraphs are:
Big Chinese tech companies appear to have turned off some AI functions to prevent cheating during the country’s highly competitive university entrance exams.
More than 13.3 million students are sitting the four-day gaokao exams, which began on Saturday and determine if and where students can secure a limited place at university.
This year, students hoping to get some assistance from increasingly advanced AI tools have been stymied.
Then there are these paragraphs, which blew me away:
In screenshots shared online, one Chinese user posted a photo of an exam question to Doubao, owned by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance. The app responded: “During the college entrance examination, according to relevant requirements, the question answering service will be suspended”.
And:
Another screenshot also revealed DeepSeek, a leading generative AI tool new to the Chinese market this year, was telling users that their service was not available during specific hours “to ensure fairness in the college entrance examination”.
I don’t remember too many times in my life that I’ve been jealous of China. But this is one.
Here in the United States, use of generative AI tools and blatant cheating sites such as Chegg go way, way up during key exam periods. We just pretend not to notice. Rather than doing anything to address it, we convince ourselves that nothing can be done and that teaching “responsible AI” is the answer — as if that works in any other context whatsoever.
I’m not saying the United States can shut down ChatGPT during the SAT or college exam season. But as far as I know, not one person is even asking ChatGPT/OpenAI to do anything except to continue selling out academic integrity for money. I mean, open question — has anyone asked OpenAI to block or even slow down academic-related queries at key times? I know they will say no. But personally, I want them on the record as saying no.
Sorry, minor tirade.
The Guardian goes on:
Yuanbao, owned by the tech company Tencent, Alibaba’s Qwen, and Moonshot’s Kimi have also turned off their picture recognition functions during exam hours, Bloomberg reports.
Imagine that.
And I guess I am not done with my rant. Chinese students, faced with the blockage in China did what? Go ahead and guess. Here, from the same article, citing a student complaint:
“I can’t use DeepSeek to upload pictures, I have to download ChatGPT again”
American tech companies, proudly answering the call to help students cheat.
Continuing:
Late last month, Chinese authorities also announced stricter entry checks at exam points, biometric identification, enhanced screening for digital devices, and radio signal blockers, state media reported.
Here, we write endless articles about surveillance and privacy.
I’m not saying the Chinese approach is best, or just. Although I absolutely prefer an approach that acknowledges a problem and tries to fix it as opposed to a see-nothing, say-nothing, do-nothing approach.
The article also says that, in some states, the government has adjusted office opening and closing times, so as not to interfere with the tests. I don’t have to love all that, but it’s hard for me not to respect it.
A Note, Request
I’m working on a new, major project with direct implications for the value of authentic work, not just in academia but much more broadly. It’s a challenge I find acute and long-lasting.
Since you read The Cheat Sheet, you may agree that human work — especially writing — has deep value. For creator and consumer alike.
If you agree, or even if you’re one of the three people who just likes me personally, I need a little help. I need to connect with people who can help get this project moving. Specifically, I am seeking connections and introductions to:
Angel investors or supporters who can invest $10,000 or more in this important, and likely profitable, enterprise. We need to raise $150,000 rather quickly.
Publishers, agents, or media executives with experience in their fields and strong networks who care about the value of human writing. Founders of media companies, book agents or publishers, executives at academic journal companies or TV studios — people who buy, publish or otherwise share written work. I’d like to speak with them about being Advisors.
High profile authors who also care deeply about the authenticity and human value in writing.
If you personally are in any of those categories, please say hello. If you know anyone in any of those categories and can make an introduction, I am asking.
If you’d like to know more about what I’m working on, please ask. Although it’s not ready — hence the investment-seeking — I am happy to share.
Thank you.